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Let’s Talk Radiators with Muirs Radiators Gore

With Kristy Summers of Muirs Radiators Gore, and Cathy Mellett of Net Branding.

Hi Kristy, lovely to connect with you today on Blab - and what’s it like down at the bottom of the South Island?

Ah it’s a bit cold to be honest, I had to put my jacket back on. It’s been sunny for a few days, but rainy again now. All good though, it gets the farmers through the door.

Tell us about what you do Kristy

I work at Muirs Radiators, and when it’s yucky weather like this, we get the farmers through the door. Because this is a time that they can’t use their tractors and other farm machinery, and so they use the time to bring them in for repairs.

So when there’s downtime you fix the machinery, so in the uptime you’re more productive?

That’s exactly right - their downtime is our up time.

Understanding a little of muirs radiators and your background, i understand you’ve pretty much grown up in that world. Do you want to tell me what it’s like working in and around a radiator shop.

To be honest, I didn’t spend a lot of time in here when I was younger. It wasn’t until I got to having my own children, and mum and dad decided they were going to purchase the business off the previous owner who Dad had worked for since he left school - and then i started spending a bit more time here at moires. I officially started working for them about 8 or 9 years ago - that’s when they purchased the place and i started working for them then. When i first started i didn’t actually start in the office, i was out on the bench fixing the radiators, and that’s how i learnt everything i needed to learn, which then gave me a better perspective for when i was talking to the clients on the phone, or writing up their invoices so to speak, so I knew what i was talking about.

It’s been interesting to see, and I didn’t understand the full implication of this, how toxic antifreeze/coolant can be. So what you’re saying that in the mix of coolant types there are some coolant types that are better than others.

Yes, absolutely. We also have here at Muirs another brand of coolant. It’s called ‘mono propylene glycol’ and that is specifically designed for classic and vintage vehicles and their systems. The modern antifreeze at the moment is quite harsh, and the older style cooling systems can’t handle that. So we use this mono propylene, we call it our ‘Muirs Vintage’ and it is less harsh on the cooling system. One of the other main reasons that we got it was that we have a couple of clients whose houses have solar panels. We use the mono propylene and they put that in their solar panel system, also because it is less harsh.

I didn’t realise that solar panel systems used antifreeze!

I didn’t either until we had some clients come in and we did some research.

Excellent! In terms of a typical day at Muirs Radiators, as part of the 0800 Radiators brand, what does a typical day look like down in your radiator shop?

Well, I know that in the workshop this morning we have about 4 or 5 what we call ‘plastic tank’ in for repairs. Those would be for something like a Toyota Camry or a Subaru Legacy or anything that needs to have their plastic tank taken off and given a good clean out put back together. We’ve just finished pulling apart a Mercedes truck - we do get some of the more heavy equipment, like a truck radiator. More so in the colder time - we’ve just come out of winter, so we did have an influx of quite a few truck radiators. And fuel tanks, we do fuel tank repairs too. While I wouldn’t call it specialised, it’s not a very common practice to repair fuel tanks, but it’s something we do down here. So we have 4 or 5 fuel tanks here at the moment waiting to be repaired as well.

So ultimately the expertise can span multiple needs of the community. So there may be a requirement of the solar panel industry that some of the antifreeze go through there, we’re looking at the farming community, we’re looking at the truck drivers, your general car drivers, then we’re looking at the vintage car environment, and the hot rods - you cross all of those markets.

Absolutely.

Just before we close Kristy, a question for you - and I know it would be what you’ve learnt from osmosis, and somebody may have an additional bit of information to share - but if you were sitting at the side of the road, or your vehicle was going, and you suddenly realised that the heat gauge was higher than it should be; if you thought there was a problem what would you recommend someone actually do in that scenario.

If it was me, I know you should turn the heater on. You might need to have your windows down because it would get really hot in there. Basically with the heater going that takes a little bit of stress off the radiator, and that should hopefully allow you to get to the nearest garage, or to find a safe place where you can pull over and call 0800radiators for instance, to work out where your nearest radiator specialist is.

Well that’s absolutely excellent. Now, I know you have somewhere to go to - I wanted to thank you for having this chat with me, and for sharing your knowledge. It’s been awsome and I’ll catch up with you next week.